High-throughput purification to provide high-quality compounds for evaluation is an important part of combinatorial chemistry technology platforms. Typically, preparatory scale purification is employed with some form of detection (e.g., mass spectroscopic detection, ultraviolet/visible wavelength (UV/Vis) detection, luminescence, evaporative light-scattering (ELS) detection, refractive index (RI) detection, electrochemical detection, and/or chemiluminescence nitrogen (CLN) detection) to collect the fractions that contain the compounds of interest. Compounds to be purified are often presented to the purification system in 96 well deep well plates of standard footprint (e.g., 96 wells in twelve columns and eight rows). An ideal work flow would process a block of 96 unpurified compounds to provide a 96 well block of purified compounds and would involve a limited number of operations. For example, the unpurified compound at a particular position of a multiwell plate (e.g., Al) would be injected onto the purification system and separated, with the fraction containing the purified compound being collected in the corresponding position (e.g., Al) of the deep well collection block. However, many preparatory purification systems provide the compound of interest in a 2-10 mL fraction, while the volume of even a deep well plate is typically at most only 2.2-4 mL and many standard centrifugal vacuum concentrators require 20-30% of the collection vessel to remain empty to allow for solvent expansion under vacuum and/or spill-free sample processing. This necessitates several concentration, reconstitution, and transfer steps that can drastically increase the complexity of this process.
The present invention overcomes the above noted difficulty by providing a temporarily increased (and optionally adjustable) capacity for sample processing regions such as e.g., the wells of a 96 well plate. A complete understanding of the invention will be obtained upon review of the following.